


Memories Of The Past

by thesilverwitch (orphan_account)



Category: Marvel
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-21
Updated: 2011-12-21
Packaged: 2017-10-27 17:25:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,278
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/298242
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/thesilverwitch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This fic started with a simple question that occurred to me as I watched the movie Captain America: "Did Steve ever tell Tony about what it was like to take the serum?"</p>
            </blockquote>





	Memories Of The Past

They’re not friends, not even close, because friendship depends on mutual affection and Tony is barely capable of caring for someone so closely; he’s used to cold touches and talks through phones, of looking but not touching, of smiles that never reach the eye, he’s used to Rhodey and Pepper, that’s it, that’s all he needs. So they aren’t, will never be, friends. They’re simply colleagues who barely know each other, they have to work together and somehow create a steady relationship out of thin air, whether they want it or not; the fate of the world is resting on their shoulders, and it’s too late to question why exactly it has to be _their_ shoulders now.

At first Tony doesn’t pay Steve much attention; he thinks Steve is just another poster boy who inspired the hearts of America, who did one noble thing and whose story was completely blown with time, like a fairytale’s monster that keeps eating and eating until it’s the size of the world, in this case, the size of a true legend. Tony doesn’t believe what he reads, doesn’t trust what he sees, because he knows many of the stories from the war were as real as water on Mars, created to impress little kids who still believed America was the greatest country of them all. Tony even ignored the few stories his father had bothered to tell him, when he was not too busy drinking or working, about the great Captain America.

He’s also busy, being a superhero and running a billionaire company is not exactly a part-time job, not exactly something a person can do three times a week on the afternoon. Between trying to get their team to work, saving the world and trying to keep the suit updated, Tony is left with no time to make friends or get to know _Steve_.

Even after seeing him in action, even after Captain America saved his ass in the battlefield more than once, Tony still doesn’t give him the full credit the man deserves. Because it’s easier that way, it’s so much easier to pretend everyone in the world is as broken as he is, and there are no perfect human beings, just men forced to battle. It’s easier to think the man, the figure Tony’s father seemed to hold so dearly to his heart was just another guy, and the only reason his father cared more for Captain America than he cared for his own son was just mere chance of fate, simply luck.

Tony’s messed up, there’s no dying that. Captain America on the other hand is, according to everything Tony’s read, and he’s read an awful lot, perfection on legs. Dashing smiles to the camera, national hero on the battlefield, friend to the people of America. He’s everything Tony’s not, and then some more.

In Tony’s head it’s simple really, how Steve stands for everything right in the world, and Tony stands for everything not so right, even though he’s trying to fix it desperately. So to make things easier, Tony avoids Steve. It’s a simple plan, except it’s not really a plan, it’s not really something that one day makes Tony stop and think about, it’s just something that happens. Tony avoids Steve, avoids being with him, and he goes on with his life, not thinking about it, not wondering why.

His fake plan, or whatever it is, seems to work for a while. Steve doesn’t push it, doesn’t try to make the relationship between Captain America and Iron Man anything more than it is, and they all go on with their complicated lives of saving the world and doing the right thing. But then, one day in SHIELD headquarters, Steve and Tony are both stuck in one of the dozens meeting rooms, waiting for Fury to show up with, well, Tony hadn’t really been paying attention to the memo, but it was something important otherwise he wouldn’t have been called in the first place. And in the midst of Steve, quietly sketching in his notebook in one side of the room, and Tony playing Angry Birds on his tablet in the other side, the emergency alarm starts ringing like an annoying parrot and SHIELD goes into lockdown.

The lights go off, the table Tony had been using makes a weird noise like a cat and dies, the doors lock with a vibrant strength and Tony learns a whole new meaning to the word ‘claustrophobic’ in less than two seconds.

“Please do not panic, this is a procedural mission for safety check-ups. It is asked that everyone stays inside their rooms and follows instructions 5031. I repeat, this is a safety check-up and it is asked that everyone follows instructions 5031.” Says an automated voice over the comms.

“What the fuck?” Tony asks indignantly, because it has to be a joke. He isn’t in lockdown, he can’t be. This is the sort of shit that just doesn’t happen to Tony Goddamn Stark.

“Oh dang.” Steve says behind him as he drops his sketchbook into the table, and rises to his feet.

“What is this?” Tony quickly turns himself around to face Steve “Do you know what this is?”

“Procedural mission. They’re checking if everyone on SHIELD knows what to do in case of an emergency. Instructions 5031 are to sit, keep calm, evaluate the premises and wait for rescue.” Steve replies with a sigh as he drops himself back to his chair; he pinches his eyes as he rubs the space between his eyebrows with one hand.

“ _Are you fucking kidding me?_ ”

“Err... No?” Steve says with an apprehensive look, and it makes Tony realize that they don’t have the sort of relationship where Tony openly curses at him.

“I mean, are we just going to sit here and do nothing?” Tony asks even though he’s already pulling a chair in front of Steve.

“Nothing else we can do.” Steve says and Tony only sighs in response.

They sit there in silence for what seems to be a very long time. Tony’s tablet isn’t working since Tony had made the severe mistake of linking it to SHIELD’s network a couple of weeks earlier, he was hoping the connection would accelerate his machine and enable him to work more quickly six floors deep into the ground, unfortunately the only thing it did was die along with all the other electronic equipment in the building. Steve tries to continue drawing, but there’s barely enough light to see, much less draw, and he gives up after a couple of frustrated sketches. 

“We should talk.” Says Steve after a while of staring into nothingness, snapping Tony out of his daze.

“What?”

“We should talk.” He repeats in such a quiet, simple way, it almost makes his sentence look like a completely normal thing to say. But it isn’t, or at least it isn’t in Tony’s head because him and Steve, they don’t _talk_. They discuss work-related things and that’s about it, they don’t talk just for the sake of talking or keeping busy.

“Why?” Tony asks, and he’s fully aware of how rude he sounds but he also doesn’t really care, it’s not like he was on the run for the Polite Guy of the Year award.

“Well, for one, there’s nothing else to do. For two, we’re teammates and we barely know each other Tony, I know you don’t really like me, which is fine.” The last part is quickly added, as if Steve was afraid Tony was going to start making up excuses for his behaviour. “But we should know each other better, for the team.”

And suddenly it all makes sense in Tony’s mind. Because the thing is, Fury had obviously known about this ‘procedural mission’. It was his organization, and a thing like a major lockdown wouldn’t happen beneath his nose, and pretty much everything relevant that Fury knew, Steve also knew. Tony wasn’t the biggest fan of making assumptions without all the data, but he was smart and he had enough information to recognize a trick when it was right in front of his face. Fury, and most likely Steve, had set this up. They’d set Tony up so him and Steve got the chance to _talk_ for the team.

This made Tony irrationally angry; he didn’t like being played, much less by his teammates. But unfortunately, as capable of making this deduction as Tony was, he was also capable of deducing if Steve thought they should talk for the team, well, than they probably really needed it. It’s not like Tony hated Steve, he just had lots of mixed feelings and emotions that made him want to stay way from him, which was very different from hating someone in Tony’s opinion.

After a while of mentally debating with himself, Tony realizes Steve is still looking at him, waiting for an answer.

“Sure. Let’s talk.”

-+-

They talk for what seems like forever to Tony. They start with small things, SHIELD’s cafeteria food they’re forced to eat whenever one of their Avengers related meetings prolongs; they talk about the Yankees, about New York City and how much it’s changed through the years. It’s a light conversation, it flows without ever getting stuck on tricky topics and Tony finds himself visibly relaxing under Steve’s gaze, he also finds it easy to talk with Steve. He doesn’t have to pretend like he usually does whenever he’s doing small talk with others, it’s odd, Tony had always imagined talking with Steve would be hard, a stiff conversation where he needed to be constantly on his guard. 

In the midst of their conversation they move to the floor, because the air conditioning has been turned off and Tony can feel his body’s temperature drop with each second, and obviously Steve can somehow sense it too because he’s the one that suggests they share some body warmth. At first Tony is reluctant to accept it due to so many different reasons, he could probably write a whole book based on them, wounded pride being the main one, but he also knows if he doesn’t do something quickly he’s going to catch a hypothermia. So he says yes, and him and Steve sit next to each other against one of the walls, shoulders, hips and knees touching.

From then on the conversation grows a little bit deeper, neither of them risk tricky or overly personal questions, but anyone with a decent pair of ears can clearly get the feeling that their conversation smoothly shifts from “casual between new friends” to “one day we might die together, and if we do, I don’t wanna die with a stranger”.

But Tony isn’t fully aware of it until he asks Steve what it was like to take the serum, a question that sounded perfectly reasonable in his mind but that made Steve shift uncomfortably.

“Painful.” Steve says with a simple sigh. “It was like someone had grabbed my body and shoved it in cold water from the North Pole, and then they’d sent me to the sun to burn, I felt like all my muscles had been torn open and my organs tied together. It was like someone exploded my brain, built it again from the scraps just to explode it once more; like being broken into a thousand tiny pieces and having machines build you again.”

“It was painful, and for a second there I honestly didn’t think I was going to make it. Did you know they were going to stop the process when they reached seventy per cent?” And no, Tony did not know that. Had never heard of a moment when the process of improving Steve’s physic almost failed.

“I was screaming in pain, but I could still hear Peggy scream at them to stop the machines. A part of me felt happy to hear her request because my body was dying, and there was nothing that I wanted more than to stop the pain. But another part of me kept constantly saying ‘I can do this, I can do this, I have a reason for doing this, I can’t give up’. So I told them to keep the machines working. Your father was the one controlling them by the way, but you probably already knew that.” And that Tony did know, it was one of the few things his father had told him about Captain America, how he’d been there, helping to create the legend.

“So, you could have stopped at any second? Chose to, well, _not_ be Captain America?” Tony asks, because he’d always known Steve was incredibly brave, but this was a whole new level of bravery since it practically destroyed Tony’s ideal that everyone in the world was as messed up as he was.

“No, not really. America needed a hero, and I was there. I mean, I had a choice, yes, but not really? Because it’s one of those choices a person can never say ‘no’ to, it’s too big to be considered, too big to be refused. You know what I mean?”

Tony only nodded in response as thoughts of his kidnapping flashed through his mind. He’d been given a choice there, fight and create Iron Man or die like a coward wimp, and even though he couldn’t deny the choice was there, he also knew it was an illusion because Tony simply couldn’t accept such a simple, coward death.

That was the moment when it dawned on Tony, that even though Steve was nothing like him, and thank God for that one, the world didn’t need another Tony Stark, he was also not so different.


End file.
